Archive for the ‘Supply Chain Risk’ Category

Bourbon, as you may know, is having a moment. As the graphic above shows, production and sales have soared in recent years. But the Wall Street Journal reports that supply chain problems may keep the industry from growing further (Bourbon Feels the Burn of a Barrel Shortage, May 11). The specific issue relates to barrels. Federal law requires that bourbon be aged for two years in new oak barrels (Why is there a federal law about bourbon? See here.) and it is getting hard to get enough bourbon barrels.

The shortage reflects a supply-chain conundrum. Upstream, barrel makers face a wave of demand because a half dozen established bourbon distilleries and 300 new, craft distilleries are increasing production amid a bourbon boom. Downstream, they face a shortage of white oak wood used in barrels because the lumber industry hasn’t rebounded from the housing market’s collapse. …

All the growth might have been intoxicating except for a sobering fact: The demand for more barrels coincided with a massive contraction in the lumber industry. As the housing market crashed in 2007, sawmills shut down and loggers abandoned the market. Lumber production shriveled to about 5.9 billion board feet in 2009 from 11.7 billion board feet in 2005, according to the Hardwood Market Report, which tracks the forestry industry.

As you may have heard, West Coast ports are having some labor issues. The Pacific Maritime Association (which represents the shipping lines and terminal operators) and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have been going at it, affecting about 20,000 workers at 29 West Coast ports. (Can’t name 29 Wet Coast ports? See here.) The LA Times has a nice summary of what is in play. In a nutshell, management claims that the union is engaging in a slow down (effectively striking while getting paid, see here) while the union claims that they are responding to safety concerns (at LA and Long Beach) and that management is misrepresenting their position. In any event, what has resulted is lots of delays and a slew of ships waiting off the coast for their chance to unload. (Never seen a slew of ships? Check out these images.)

OK, that’s all well and good, but how is this affecting supply chains? The sheer scale of the problem is rather mind-blowing. If it were just a question of losing one port, things wouldn’t be too bad. Ships bound for LA, could be sent to Oakland or Seattle. But it’s the entire West Coast. If the goods need to be offload to an US port, that means going all the way to the Gulf Coast or the East Coast. It’s not clear that is an easy solution. Part of why LA and Long Beach are such busy ports is that they have an entire infrastructure to support them. Even if a ship could get to, say, Charleston, it’s not clear that it would do a lot of good for some of the customers whose stuff is on the ship. If a company’s whole logistics system is based on breaking bulk in the Central Valley, having a bunch of containers in South Carolina is, at best, an inconvenience. (more…)

Here is an interesting factoid for you: 24% of all the vehicles manufactured right now are built on just ten platforms. What’s more, by the end of the decade that number is expected to grow to 30%. The number comes from an Automotive News article that looks at some of the consequences of the trend (With the push for standard parts, quality is key, Aug 6).

First, why automakers are trying to move in this direction is clear. Being able to build multiple model off one basic platform saves a ton of money in product development as well as tooling and build manufacturing facilities. Further, they benefit from a bit of risk pooling; if one model is not selling particularly well, that may be offset by another that can be built at the same plant. Thus, even if a model slumps, all that expensive capacity is till being used. (See this post from last fall on how Ford is cutting its number of platforms from 15 to 9.) Globalization also plays a part in this. What kinds of vehicles sell well might vary across different continents, but if European, Asian and North American models can all be built on the same platforms, manufacturers with a global footprint can be ever more cost competitive.

But what about suppliers? With purchased components making up a significant chunk of the cost of a vehicle, car makers would like standardization there. In a perfect world, you would have the same break system on every model built on a platform, but that brings challenges.

“The requirement that we face is clearly to develop products from the outset in such a way that they can be used in all the platform derivatives without the expense of making changes,” said Sabine Woytowicz, regional quality director at Valeo in Germany.

But with mass standardization, a part with a quality problem can now be supplied to millions of vehicles. That puts a premium on quality. …

Martin Thier, director of corporate quality management at the Mahle Group, said: “When obtaining an order, we check its feasibility for both product development and manufacturing even more closely.”

It comes down to “knowing precisely what you do, what you can do and how good you are at it.”

For example, he said, there is now a more intense interest in investigating how an inconsequential error in one part would produce an effect in a different component.

So how many different radiator models does a global car company need? Clearly it needs enough to accommodate different sized engines and cars. A big pick up with an over-sized cylinder eight-engine is going to need something different from a subcompact with an under-sized four-cylinder engine. But does that translate to twenty-something radiator designs or ninety-something?

In one of President Akio Toyoda’s biggest initiatives since taking over in 2009, the carmaker is winnowing the number of parts it uses and increasing common components across models. The plan will cut both the time and cost for creating new models by as much as 30 percent, according to estimates from Toyota. …

In the past, Toyota focused on developing custom parts. It needed 50 types of knee-level airbags because seats for various models had different profiles. By standardizing “hip heights,” as the automaker calls it, across models, Toyota says it can reduce knee airbag variants by 80 percent.

As of last year, the automaker had slashed radiators to 21 models from about 100, according to Shinichi Sasaki, Toyota’s global purchasing chief. And the company is reducing the number of cylinder sizes in its engines to six from more than 18 by 2016, the Nikkan Kogyo newspaper reported June 4. Toyota declined to comment on the report.

“From now on, Toyota will seek the compatibility of certain parts it uses with standard parts used by many automakers globally,” the company said in a statement outlining its Toyota New Global Architecture, or TNGA, in March.

Some of the anticipated benefits here are fairly obvious. For example, the article mentions that standardizing parts like radiators that customers don’t care much about (beyond knowing that the car has one) will free up engineering time to work on body or cockpit design that customers do care about. Similarly, many of the implementation challenges (such as standardizing hip height) are fairly clear. Customers may not care about knee-level airbags per se, but standardizing those means standardizing some aspect of the interior design. Customer may or may not notice.

The most interesting part of this to me is its implications for supply chain risk. (more…)

Major storms like Hurricane Sandy and other unexpected events have prompted some companies to modify the popular just-in-time style of doing business, in which only small amounts of inventory are kept on hand, to fashion what is known as just-in-case management. …

Just-in-case is a response to the vulnerability of just-in-time supply chains, said Rene Circ, CoStar’s director of industrial research. Since the 1990s, just-in-time has made sense for many companies looking to reduce the cost of keeping large inventories on hand. Technology enabled retailers and manufacturers to closely track and ship items to replace merchandise sold or components consumed in production.

This model also reduced transportation costs, because goods would be shipped only as necessary. By combining the just-in-case with just-in-time strategy, Mr. Circ said, companies are trying to strike a balance between “carrying the minimum inventory possible, yet never running out of things, because inventory equals cost.”

I’ve been trying to think what I should say about this article for several weeks. I have felt conflicted because, on the one hand, it hits on some interesting points. On the other hand, it also leads with one of my pet peeves of business reporting. Specifically, it links any change in inventory management to some failure of just-in-time management. However, I am not convinced that is actually a good description of what is going on here.

That is when the Boca Raton, Fla., producer of Inkoos stuffed monsters and Justin Bieber dolls has to file orders with its Chinese suppliers to ensure delivery by the spring holiday. It used to place orders closer to the key selling period, which allowed it to get a sharper sense of demand and better manage its cash. But now the greater concern is making sure it doesn’t get left shorthanded because of China’s New Year holiday.

The company is one of many from the U.S. and other countries that are closely watching China as factory workers slowly return this week from the country’s long Lunar New Year holiday. Every year, millions of China’s 250 million migrant workers leave their factories and travel across the country to visit their families at home. The problem for toy and apparel makers in particular is that fewer and fewer workers are returning to the factories when the break is over.

Like this:

We already wrote about Sandy and its impact on operations immediately after the storm here. Several stories began to emerge on how firms managed to handle the storm. Recently, the NY Times had an article on how Eileen Fisher managed the pre-storm preparation and the recovery (“Retailer Shakes Off the Storm“).

Recovery was both an urgent and a daunting task. A broad insurance policy helped a lot. So did some planning and a good amount of luck. As did an almost out-of-body detachment on executives’ parts to see past the emotion of sewage-soaked shirts and stained rolls of fabric to the prize of reopening a ravaged business.

When we talk about Disruption Risk Management, we discuss the three levels that need to be managed well: strategic, tactical and execution. The strategic level requires creating a resilient operations network (internal and external) and instituting effective risk-management process. The tactical level requires identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities in the current operations network, including threat identification and outlining an action plans. The execution level includes monitoring evolving risks and activating pre-planned contingencies. The article provides an excellent example of the interplay between the tactical level and the execution one.